Book Review
Story Stream
Diagnosing the Ideological Mind April 16, 2025
When, in 1969, I travelled through Afghanistan (this was in the days of good King Zahir Shah, good certainly by comparison with all who came after him), it never occurred to me, callow as I was, that the country might be transformed any time soon int...
Climate Crisis as Divine Comedy April 16, 2025
As the writer Joy Williams strolls the beef barn at the county fair, she notes mournfully the lovely eyelashes of the future filets mignons. “There’s such a disconnect here,” she says. While charmed by the farm animals of southern Michigan, she knows...
Can Everyone Be Religious? April 15, 2025
The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other word...
Farewell to the Last Writer of the Latin American Boom April 15, 2025
Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America’s best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading...
Indie, Please April 15, 2025
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I went to many rock shows in Williamsburg and Bushwick. The neighborhoods, like me, were a bit scruffier then. The glass monoliths had not yet swallowed up the waterfront....
Fashionable Nonsense April 15, 2025
You’ve heard the rumors. People named Dennis are more likely to become dentists. If you do a little ritual before you go on stage, you’ll perform better. If you give your employees chocolate chip cookies, they will become, as if by magic, more motiva...
Peter Baker & Susan Glasser's Excellent 'Kremlin Rising' April 14, 2025
It’s easy to forget that a little over five years ago U.S. schools were closed, public events were canceled, dining inside restaurants was illegal, the operation of all manner of businesses was deemed illegal, socializing among humans was demonized a...
Bill Gates Version 1.0 April 14, 2025
Before Jeff Bezos could create Amazon, or Mark Zuckerberg could create Facebook, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin could create Google, someone had to build the foundation of modern technology that now dominates every aspect of our lives....
The Surprising History of the Ideology of Choice April 14, 2025
The restaurant as we know it was invented in Paris around the late 1700s. Foreign visitors called the city’s restaurants the “most peculiar” and “most remarkable” things. At a traditional inn or tavern, you ate what was served, at a communal table, a...
Doing Nothing Is Everything April 11, 2025
It takes hard work to do nothing—truly nothing. And it’s not just the effort of concentration and attention involved in staying still, but all that precedes the act: the years of training and preparation, the self-discipline you need to master, the p...
Reservation Politics April 10, 2025
EARLY ON IN Jon Hickey’s Big Chief (2025), Mitch, the novel’s antihero, visits Waabizh, a medicine man whom his mentor, Joe Beck, respects and trusts. During their conversation, Waabizh refers to Mitch by his Anishinaabemowin name, Mishkigabo—a name ...
Picture Perfect April 10, 2025
Unbounded—that was the strange word bubbling up as I wandered Helmut Newton’s exhibition on a Berlin summer morning in 2019. It was only my fifth day in the city and already the relief of having arrived, and the giddiness for what lay ahead, was begi...
A Man About Town April 09, 2025
One summer night in the early 1960s, at a rally in New York City, the great newspaper columnist Murray Kempton admitted to an audience full of battered old Reds that while America had not been kind to them, it was lucky to have had them. My mother tu...
Splitting Our Sides April 09, 2025
After God created the Heavens and the Earth and saw that it was good, He thanked Lorne Michaels in his acceptance speech and rested. Lorne said, “Not bad. Now try making something new like that every week for 50 years. While worrying about sponsors.”...
Embodiment as Enigma April 09, 2025
Good health allows itself to be forgotten. It allows our minds to forget the very fact of our embodiment. Our bodies might be so serenely and submissively compliant as to simply dissolve, so hollow and harmonious as to seemingly collapse into mere ve...
Frontier Fiction at Its Best April 08, 2025
The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn, is a novella about Levi English, a boy on the Texas frontier of the 1820s who grows up among a band of Comanche. It is inspired by a true story but feels like an emanation of folklore. Although the prose is richly tex...
A New Translation Breaths Fresh Life Into Charles Baudelaire April 08, 2025
Despite being born more than two hundred years ago, Charles Baudelaire’s poetry retains the feeling of something contemporary. In Verso Books’ new dual-language edition of The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal), translated economically by Nathan Bro...
Repudiating Genesis April 07, 2025
When the quarantine against the unwalled capitalists literally crumbled in 1989 and the walled-in workers fled their paradise in droves, Western analysts were confounded. Wasn’t history supposed to move leftward? Some resorted to the “it wasn’t real ...
Childhood Is Over April 07, 2025
It happens suddenly, sometimes before we even recognize it, and we don’t get any say. We might be slow to acknowledge it; we might even resist it. But we can’t avoid it, or wish it away. Eventually we learn to process it, accept it, move forward. Wha...
On Haley Mlotek’s 'No Fault' April 07, 2025
First came the marriage plot; then came the commercial divorce memoir, an epiphanic form relishing little pleasures and self-discovery afforded by international travel.Both genres were new once. Now, they each have their practitioners, who might upho...
Baseball and Belonging in One Small Town April 07, 2025
In late 2020 Major League Baseball reduced its number of minor-league affiliates by around 40, a move that risked depriving some regions of the country of the beloved midsummer sound of a bat smacking a ball....
A Question Well-Posed April 04, 2025
Soren Kierkegaard once remarked that we can never be reminded too often that a man existed named Socrates. Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates thus comes as a particularly timely reminder. Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, ...
Ross Douthat’s Serious Fantasy April 04, 2025
What does it take to get a fantasy novel published these days, if not a famous name and a great manuscript? Judging by The Falcon’s Children, a high epic fantasy by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, it seems the answer is a gimmick ...
An Exile in Time and Space April 04, 2025
The addresses collected in We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were written by a man on the run. The earliest is his Nobel Prize lecture, printed in 1972 after he sent it to Stockholm in place of a live app...
The Way of All Flesh April 04, 2025
Here’s a hypothetical: your newborn and your grandma are drowning. If you can only save one of them, who do you save? Now it’s your sister and your aunt, your cousin and your brother. That’s what I thought; most people will save the person they most ...
